Case Study: How to Make $10,000 a Month GIVING AWAY a Free Course

Suppose you could give away free access to a course to anyone and everyone.

And further suppose that by giving away the course, you could make $10,000 a month.

Interested? Here’s how one guy (we’ll call him Jim) is doing exactly that:

Jim created a large, comprehensive course aimed at newbies who want to start an online business.

Mind you, he didn’t create it from scratch. Rather, he took the best PLR he could find and repurposed it into a massive course that teaches people all of the main methods of online marketing, such as PPC, affiliate marketing, list building, flipping websites, Amazon, selling software, creating info products, blogging and so forth.

In the course, he includes the basics of each method and encourages his students to choose a method and get busy building their business.

Then for each method, he promotes an affiliate link for the ‘best’ in-depth course in each category.

Now pay attention to this next bit – he only promotes recurring courses. That is, membership type courses and sites that bill month after month.

So when he makes a sale, he’s going to continue to get paid on it for as long as that person remains a member.

It gets even better, because he also promotes related products such as web hosting, autoresponders and so forth. Anything that makes sense, works and bills monthly is a product he’s likely to promote.

And he doesn’t even stop there. He is also creating his own recurring courses on each topic. Once he finishes a course, he puts it online and then changes the corresponding affiliate links to his own course.

He likes to make each course a set length of time such as six to eight months, because he’s found the students tend to stay longer and pay more when there is an ‘end’ in sight.

And of course inside each of his own courses, he promotes corresponding products that help his students build their businesses faster and easier.

He does all of this by first building trust with his list, showing that he knows what he is talking about, and being the reader’s advocate and teacher.

Creating the trust is crucial, and it’s pretty darn easy, too. When you tell your readers the good and the bad of any money making method, they start to trust you. Remember, most marketing emails for online business type products are only telling the subscribers how great something is. They don’t tell what’s not so great. But he always gives his opinion, both good and bad, and because of that people love him, trust him and pretty much do whatever he says to do.

So by the time he gets around to promoting affiliate links, his readers are taking his suggestions without a second thought.

I know he’s earning at least $10,000 a month with this method, and frankly he’s not working all that hard, either. The main thing he focuses on is continuing to bring new people into his free course, knowing that eventually he will make one or more sales to many of them. And when he does, those sales will be recurring.

It’s a great business model and one that almost anyone can duplicate. Remember that your target market is newbies and folks who haven’t seen much success yet in their online business.

And you can monetize this even further if you like, by promoting special deals to your readers who have been with you long enough to trust you, as well as selling solo mailings to other marketers.

One thing – if you decide to sell solo ads, I’d advise you generally only send the ads to those subscribers who have not purchased from you. It’s a way to monetize your non-buyers, without annoying or losing any of your customers.

Now you might be wondering – how do you give away your course? The fastest way to do it without relying on other list owners is to set up a funnel in which you drive paid traffic (ie. using Facebook or Google). Ideally the funnel is self-liquidating, so that it pays for itself. And you can do this by advertising your free course, and then having a backend product that allows you to break even.

There you have it… A blueprint to earning $10,000 or more per month… So what are you gonna do with it?